A few weeks ago this paper ran an interview with David Warner. I wrote it. He agreed to it cheerfully despite having just arrived in South Africa from New Zealand via a brain-bending series of flights. He was keen and spoke in extended and considered fashion: about family, playing a character villain, the realities of an underprivileged upbringing and his desire to help people from similar backgrounds. He spoke about change and maturing as a person. He was impressive.
On Wednesday Warner was named by his home cricket board as the instigator and central figure in a plot to tamper with the match ball during the Newlands Test, having recruited the team’s most junior player to carry this out. Like Warner, Cameron Bancroft and Steve Smith have received lengthy bans but only Warner is also banned from ever leading an Australian side again.
So much of that interview now looks absurd. “I just like having responsibility,” he said of captaining Australia’s 20-over team. Or, of his schedule: “It does have its challenges, but you are living the dream. I want to play cricket for Australia.”
In a way this fits with Warner. He has always been erratic, prone to switching modes depending on internal whim. He has been the team attack dog who barked at Faf du Plessis, and the silent man of the West Indies in 2015. He has been great with captaincy, and a disciplinary nightmare. People think that one direction disproves another, but with Warner all of it is true at once.
Until this episode, at least, which involved a new darkness. On this South African tour things shifted. A couple of days after that cheerful interview for our podcast in Durban, he ran out AB de Villiers at Kingsmead and went berserk. Veins popping from his neck, eyes bugging, you could not tell if team‑mates were embracing or restraining him in a huddle at midwicket, as he tried to wrestle up and out of their arms like a frothing dog. All the while he was screaming: skyward, scattergun, at the other batsman, all over.
I flinched. It was too much, too aggressive. It looked like gloating, and a loss of control. He carried on the day in similar fashion, constantly chipping at the batsmen. When Quinton de Kock shot a foul comment back at him about his wife, Warner lost it for real.
When it happened, it seems to have set Warner off on a dangerous path, in which he combined his fury at the South Africa team and their supporters with a righteousness that meant he felt better than them. His anger had helped create the situation that was now perpetuating it. With that rage bubbling away, the urge to win became so intense that he decided anything was fair game.
The language of the charge sheet is interesting in its specificity. Smith is charged with “knowledge of a potential plan and “failure to take steps to seek to prevent” it. His main crime came in lying later to cover up for his team-mates. Warner, conversely, is charged with developing the plan, instructing Bancroft, advising him, then actually giving him a demonstration in how to doctor a ball.
Of this most absurd part of the story, my colleague Adam Collins paints Warner as a telemall shopping host demonstrating the merchandise. Other Twitter wags cast the lesson as Patrick Swayze’s pottery scene from Ghost. But it is less funny when you see the reality of corrupting a player swayed by your star power. The bitterness of Warner’s personal feud led to a self‑destruction that took down those around him.
That is why the severity of the punishment is tilted towards the former vice-captain. Last time he visited Cape Town, Warner made twin centuries in the match to announce his arrival as a senior player to be relied upon. This time he was drummed out of the game for having been a senior player who proved he could not be relied upon.
Of all the parts of that interview that look dubious in retrospect, it is one of my quotes rather than his that really stands out. “The reality is that few batsmen in the world know their own game as deeply, and while 21 Test centuries already put him among Australia’s elite, he could yet double that tally.”
Not any more. David Warner will never play for Australia again.
